Friday, March 31

Wednesday night: Drive to Breckenridge by way of Keystone, to see State Radio play a bar called Yeti &
Sherpa's. The music is good. The crowd talks a lot, which seems to be standard
practice for Colorado crowds at rock shows.

(Us Against the Crown is a damn fine album, by the way.)

Ride with a friend of Beau's from Keystone. Pick up, on the way
back, a 50-something hitchhiker who keeps saying "Not this one, but the
next one, I swear" and offering us bong hits.

Thursday, March 23

After about four hours of beating my head against display.pl and LaTeX, here
is test.pdf, which is bad on several levels,
but is probably 9/10 of the way to being a real book. Given that I keep running
into ways for raw HTML to play hell with LaTeX, this is actually relatively
painless.

Stephen might well [March_19_2006|be right] about using TeX
directly, or at least there might be a better package to use than LaTeX. Making
the switch should be trivial, since I'm generating the whole thing from a
quasi-HTML source file.

This book thing has highlighted some massive, heretofore only-just-suspected
holes in my technical knowledge & sense of history. It's a familiar
sensation, but I haven't felt anything quite like it while using a computer in
years.

Tuesday, March 21

Sunday, March 19

dead trees

CarolAnn was in Boulder last week, and in between bottles of
Jameson we managed to compile a stack of poems for the chapbook I've
been wanting to print and distribute.

My current plan is something like 32-46 pages at 8.5 x 5.25. I think I
can get a hundred copies, saddle stitched, for around $160 — which my
upcoming tax return ought to cover. (If anyone has suggestions for
which printing service to go with, let me know. I have a couple in
mind, but I'm new to this game.) I plan to fit all the poems CA
gave me, a couple that CA and Elizabeth wrote together, and one of Alan's,
then fill the balance with old stuff from p1k3.

I was going to use some kind of free desktop publishing package for
this, probably Scribus. I
still might, but an offhand remark from Levi has me thinking about
LaTeX instead.

LaTeX is a document package based on Don Knuth's TeX.
TeX is a typesetting
language which has been around since approximately the dawn of time, and
LaTeX itself dates from 1985 or so.

LaTeX seems to get most of its use in the academic & scientific
communities. From what I've seen, the markup is not especially pretty,
and probably isn't much fun to write. There are lots of backslashes
and curly brackets. As far as I can tell, nothing produces better
looking output.

tuesday, march 14

unexpectedly, i am sitting
in the coffeehouse again
at the same table by the
dirty dish window
the coffee tastes the same
the girl with the short black
hair is still behind the counter
just outside the door,
the guy with the tattoo
on his throat hits me up for
change.

Saturday, March 11

standard wiki markup

Alan asked the other night what I thought a core set of wiki markup/syntax
conventions would be. I've attached the
bulk of the mail I wrote, on the off chance anyone's interested.

I think there's probably never going to be a really standard wiki syntax,
unless you count things like
Textile, which a lot of people
seem to like, or MediaWiki's syntax, which probably sees the most use, given
the sheer size of Wikipedia. This doesn't actually bother me too much as long
as people keep designing with a couple of ideas in mind - transparency and
low barriers to entry, more or less.

It might be cool to see a straightforward standard ("here is my set
of regular expressions") for transporting wiki text. Wonder if anyone's
working on this.

Tuesday, March 7

copyfight

To pick up on an earlier post and some subsequent
discussion, I think I see three priorities
with regard to IP law. I'll use the first person plural in the highly
restrictive sense of "me and people who feel pretty much like I
do".

First, we should work to increase the overall breadth and depth of the
public domain. This includes efforts to create more free content - and just
as importantly, to release more existing content.

Secondly, we should work to subvert existing intellectual property laws as
much as possible, and use their provisions to achieve effects precisely
contrary to their industrially designed intent. I think GPL and Creative
Commons style licensing falls under this heading, though it clearly overlaps
in intent with "increase the public domain".

Thirdly, we should attempt to create an attack-resistant infrastructure for
directly subverting an intolerable legal regime.

Saturday, March 4

tweak

Modified public domain footer to sound slightly less self-righteous.

relativity

last night, after the symphonic led
zeppelin cover act, we hit a bar in
denver with some people
t. was buying rounds of jaegger shots
let's be conservative and say
20 shots of jaegger is, what
maybe a hundred, hundred and twenty?

it was not a bad time
i miss drinking with people
my age in decent bars
and they served a pretty good
cheeseburger, with lots of
condiments on a plastic tray
and three bucks for a rolling rock
is about as cheap as the
drinkable beer gets in these parts

in the other room
elizabeth is making a scrapbook
about going to india
pictures of dark skinned, fine
featured kids at a trade school
holding intricate objects they
have obviously made themselves
"i have held a job since
i was four years old".

Thursday, March 2

steal this electronic abstraction of a text

There hasn't been a copyright notice on this page for a long time, for
reasons which may be obvious to those who know me well. Lately I have realized
that in a world where infringement is generally presumed for any use without a
documented disclaimer, the lack of a statement is perhaps
insufficient.

So now there is a notice in the footer on p1k3.com, which reads as
follows:

All original content on p1k3, unless otherwise noted, is dedicated to the
public domain and may thus be freely re-used or modified, for any purpose
whatever, in perpetuity. I, Brennen Bearnes, assert only the moral right to
attribution where it is both reasonable and practical.

I thought about using either a Creative Commons license or the GNU Free
Documentation License, a la Wikipedia & its sister projects. I appreciate
the cultural momentum that CC is building, and the viral legal hack of
the CC attribution/share-alike license or the GFDL has value. Turning strong
IP against itself has probably
been necessary to the flourishing of the free software movement. (Advocates of
less restrictive licensing will disagree with this last. My contention is not
that a GPL-style viral license is necessary or desirable for every body of
code, but rather that the GPL has helped enormously to create a strong and
defensible ecology of free code in a hostile legal & social
environment.)

Ultimately, though, I don't believe that the creative work I do is in much
danger of being hijacked for purposes of which I would not approve. And unlike
much useful code, the text of a poem is essentially transparent in its received
form. While there is a strong rationale for ensuring by legal means that
software remains open when modified by a third party, releasing my text and
images into the public domain is probably a sufficient guarantee of such
transparency as the form demands.

Even so, I feel some hesitation. There is vanishingly little chance that I
will profit from work I release on the web, and even less that making it freely
available would impact any profit, but it's still hard to shake the sense that
waiving copyright is dangerous or foolish. We are taught, under this legal
framework and the dominant culture of art, to assume that copyright is an
inviolable moral right, inherent in the act of creation. I no longer believe
these things, and I no longer equate legal structure with moral value, but the
gut feeling dies hard. Still, my attitude towards so-called intellectual
property (I will note in passing that I include especially patents and any
ownership of genetics) is anarchistic, and has been for a while. It is well
past time to put my text where my mouth is.

As Lessig points out in Free Culture, the act of releasing a
creative work into the public domain was once unnecessary: The legal framework
generally placed the burden on those who wished to obtain and defend a
copyright, by requiring registration and an explicit notice. Under current
US law, this situation is reversed.
Copyright is automatic, and the burden falls squarely on the shoulders of
anyone who wishes to disclaim restrictions on the use of their own creative
work, and to an even greater extent on any party attempting to re-use the work
of others. Additionally, the potential costs of failing to document and cover
every border-case are so egregious that it is always safer to assume a legal
obligation exists. Along with the public domain, the doctrine of fair-use is
effectively nullified for almost all applications.

Though I used to like the "you made it, you own it" model for its
apparent simplicity and its neat mapping onto the sense of ownership which any
creative act inspires, right now I suspect that it has deeply problematic
(unintended?) consequences. Even in a world where copyright protection is
desirable. I would rather not feel obligated to make any statement at all, but
it seems necessary, in a quiet way, to do something.

I used to come across a graffito about once a week, on some wall or sidewalk
in Nebraska: What is left that isn't owned?

This is my answer.

ramificate

Which brings me to unintended consequences. Quotations fall under fair use,
and my own text is not problematic. Running a wiki,
though, is interesting.

In a saner world, it wouldn't present a problem. The entire model of a wiki
is more or less orthogonal to the existing legal model of content ownership.
And I'm happy with that. In fact, I'd generally like to encourage it. But I
suppose if I'm going to the trouble of putting boilerplate on the main page, I
ought to think about the big wad of pages in
p1k3::wala.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? Is there an established framework for
making sure your bases are covered and everything's out there in the open,
wiki-wise? (By which I mean a small page footer kind of framework, not a GFDL
kind of framework.)

For that matter, does anyone particularly object to bits of text they've put
up being tossed to the public domain winds?